MOST-MENTIONED SPORTS FIGURES
Rather than break down the amount of time a specific athlete or figure was covered, we counted how frequently names were mentioned in the transcripts from the week. The 15 most-mentioned sports people for March 30-April 5l:

Notes

Brittney Griner beat the Kentucky Wildcats: Dunking wasn't the only thing Griner borrowed from the men's game. She also became the first female athlete in 2012 to rank as the most-mentioned person on SportsCenter during a given week. As Baylor won a title and completed the first 40-win season in women's college basketball history—in a championship game carried by ESPN—Griner got 72 mentions, far more than either victorious Kentucky men's coach John Calipari or Wildcats star Anthony Davis.

ESPN had to sit on the sidelines for its men's college basketball coverage: So this is what the Worldwide Leader looks like when it doesn't get preferential treatment. The Final Four is one big event where ESPN can't enjoy its usual inside-the-arena broadcast sets and instant postgame interviews, thanks to CBS's exclusive rights to the men's tournament. Part of the deal is that, for the first 30 minutes after a game's end, the CBS family of networks gets exclusive access to the highlights. For most of the tournament, ESPN was able to hide this pretty well, showing highlights from earlier games while waiting for CBS's exclusivity window to close.

With the season reduced to one game on Monday, however, ESPN had nowhere to hide. In the moments after Kentucky beat Kansas, SportsCenter broke into the regular programming (as is customary) and immediately began showing live footage of Wildcats fans celebrating in the streets of Lexington. But, unlike other championship games (the college football national championship in particular, which airs on ESPN), SportsCenter didn't go straight to highlights. Aided only by pictures of drunken co-eds celebrating in the streets, Dick Vitale and Rece Davis talked back and forth for 30 consecutive minutes and broke down what they had watched (on CBS) before they were finally allowed to air highlights from the game. For half an hour, ESPN, a multi-billion dollar corporation, had basically the same access as an unpaid blogger. And it was awesome.

Reef the sails! Disney synergy is a-blowing: But the network was able to draw on its corporate power elsewhere. During the Shell Open, mustache-wearing golfer Johnson Wagner made fun of fellow competitor Ricky Fowler's facial hair. The fine folks at SportsCenter noticed that Fowler resembled the fictional character Jack Sparrow, from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Laughs were had. But why stop there? The rest of the highlights from the tournament were accompanied by music from the Pirates movie while the crew made a bunch of pirate and maritime puns. No need to license the music. Disney owns the Pirates franchise, from the original amusement-park ride to—ahoy, there!—the newest movie, set to begin production this summer.